Islamist terror could kill off the West's liberal values

French newspapers and magazines illustrating the terror attacks in a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray

Bernard Cazeneuve’s statement might have appeared smugly oracular, or perhaps just irritatingly French. Responding to national outrage over the killing of a blameless, elderly priest at his altar, France’s interior minister observed, “We can’t step back from the rule of law to protect the rule of law.”

What a strange moment, you might think, to become opaquely philosophical. The official statements from Francois Hollande’s government seemed to occupy a grand metaphysical plane in which the principles of liberty were more relevant matters for debate than the startling failures of the security and criminal justice systems which had allowed this grotesque murder to take place.

To British ears particularly, the public utterances of the French president and his officials seemed bizarrely out of focus with the actual bloody event. Even to the French, the idea that the gratuitous killing in Rouen should be met with high-flown rhetoric about democratic ideals began to seem absurd, especially when more and more details were revealed about the legal oddities. Both the attackers were well-known to French intelligence. One, Adel Kermiche, was thought dangerous enough to be electronically tagged, but his surveillance was mystifyingly switched off in the mornings, allowing him to move freely wherever he chose. The other, Abdel Malik P, had somehow been lost in the system even though he was known to be an active threat. As the picture of shambolic incompetence on the ground became clearer, the determination of the government pronouncements to remain stratospherically abstract got stronger. How futile and ridiculous it seemed.

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Now the French media have become embroiled in what appears to be an equally recondite argument about how much attention terrorists should receive. Le Monde newspaper was first to announce that it would no longer publish the names and photographs of those who committed terrorist acts in order to avoid rewarding them with “posthumous glory”. (This was not unlike the decision by the Thatcher government during the Ulster terror campaign to ban the broadcasting of IRA spokesmen so as to deny them “the oxygen of publicity” – a rule blatantly subverted by the BBC which simply dubbed their statements with the voices of actors.) But the state-run France Televisions director Michel Field flatly disagreed: “Our duty is to inform, it’s the right of citizens to be informed … we must resist this race toward self-censorship and grand declarations of intention.” Anyway, he pointed out, such censorship was absurd in the age of social media. He might have added that a self-denying ordinance in the mainstream news would allow greater influence to the wilder speculations of social media. But as I write, this self-absorbed existential crisis among French news outlets – with all its “grand declarations of intention” – remains unresolved. Any effect that it might have on the likelihood of containing acts of terrorism seems to be beside the point.

I offer all this as a preamble to what I am about to say: to show that I genuinely understand why the populations of Europe should feel exasperated by the “back to first principles” discussion in which political leaders and commentators engage when faced with organised mass murder and acts of insane violence. Seeing innocent bystanders mowed down by a lorry, or quiet churches violated by homicidal jihadists, does not generally cause ordinary people to dwell on the finer points of democratic tradition. What matters to most people most of the time is that they and their loved ones should be safe as they go about their law-abiding business. Under what appears to be immediate threat, it is quite striking how readily free-born citizens will say that they are prepared to give up their constitutional rights in return for security in the streets. When political leaders speak of terrorism being a “threat to our values” (or “our way of life”), they are usually aware that, at least when explicitly asked, their electorates are more concerned with the preservation of life itself than with the civil liberties that are supposed to make it worth living.

But none of that means that the higher discussion – the concern about “our values” in modern, enlightened countries – can be ignored.

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What Mr Cazeneuve said is sound, and actually quite clear. It is, in fact, the most fundamental rule of a society based on the idea of “freedom under the law”. It cannot be separated from the question of how effectively policing and security measures are carried out because it inevitably affects policy on matters of enforcement, surveillance and the invasiveness of the state. When people are frightened or enraged, they may claim that they are unconcerned about the sacrifice of personal privacy or civil liberties; but if we took them at their word, there would eventually be nothing left of the idea of government by consent and the freedom of the individual. So yes, we do have to talk about democracy, not just about the urgent concrete facts of mass murder or terrorism, or even the particular practical failings of the government agencies that deal with them.

This conversation actually began – with specific reference to Islam – quite a while ago. When copies of Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, were burned in the street and a fatwa was issued against him requiring long-term state protection, a great deal of airtime and press coverage was devoted to leisurely debate about free speech versus religious sensitivity. When the issue became Sharia law versus the rights of women, there was another tranche of serious-minded controversy. Essentially this was an argument about whose rights had priority: did authors or women in a modern democracy take precedence over the religiously observant? Even more contentiously: how does a liberal society deal with illiberalism? Does advocating tolerance of other cultural attitudes permit the undermining of freedoms and ideas of equality which are now established by law in advanced countries?

Then suddenly we were plunged into questions of life and death on a much bigger scale. This wasn’t an academic discussion anymore. When there is a wave of indiscriminate murders of innocent civilians, it is tempting to decide that this is when the talking and the ruminations must stop. Never mind the speculation about alienation, or clashing cultural values, or threats to our usual standard of personal liberty. We are in a state of war – and that, it could be said, has traditionally permitted a suspension of the luxuries of privacy and freedom.

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Censorship and state propaganda are accepted in times of war, as are the limitations on what would normally be regarded as private communication (“careless talk costs lives”). Whatever it takes and however distasteful the means might be, this threat must be extirpated. That is the case being made even by the sort of intellectuals who might have been engaging in more high-flown arguments not long ago. It is almost certainly the view of many ordinary people. The protection of the populace has to top every other consideration. There are no civil liberties in the grave.

But scarcely any of this makes sense in the present circumstances. This is a conflict with people who are now part (often by invitation) of our own societies. Should a country refuse entry to those who will not accept its values, or do those values (of tolerance and acceptance of disagreement) mean that it must make its peace with them? If peace cannot be made, what then? How far do we go in abrogating our own standards of legality to extinguish the threat? Even when all the sloppy haphazardness of the security operation has been eliminated, these questions will remain.